The Personalist Project

Frankl on the importance of having a unique calling

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any, ‘how.’

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I have something more substantial in the works for this space, but I had to take a moment to share an observation I made this morning.

I've begun a series on my Patheos blog on #tonicmasculinity --a set of examples of good men--not extraordinary men, not high-achievers or celebrities--but quotidian, relatable men who live well, without the taint of the toxic models of masculinity that hurt so many men and women.

The main thrust of the article is one I have to disagree with. The author says repeatedly that all that matter is what you can offer others--your value is equal to your utility, even if that utility is sometimes in the form of social enjoyment. The low point of the article comes when the author unwittingly sums up this particularly American definition of identity in very blunt terms.

Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are.

...You don't have to like it. I don't like it when it rains on my birthday. It rains anyway. Clouds form and precipitation happens. People have needs and thus assign value to the people who meet them.

This far in, I could not decipher why my reader would recommend this article to me. What relationship is there between this utilitarianism and the kind of positive masculinity I am attempting to describe?

But then, the author stumbled into something that almost--almost--gets at the deeper relationship between being and doing, the self and the acting self:

Don't get me wrong; who you are inside is everything -- the guy who built a house for his family from scratch did it because of who he was inside. Every bad thing you've ever done has started with a bad impulse, some thought ricocheting around inside your skull until you had to act on it. And every good thing you've done is the same -- "who you are inside" is the metaphorical dirt from which your fruit grows.

Of course, he immediately loses the thread and concludes,

But here's what everyone needs to know, and what many of you can't accept:

"You" are nothing but the fruit.

Nobody cares about your dirt. "Who you are inside" is meaningless aside from what it produces for other people.

So close, and yet so far!

It resonates because it is almost true. You cannot separate the man from his choices. Our selfhood is the soil our fruit is rooted in.

But he's wrong to say that the fruit is all that matters. The value of a life cannot be weighed in utilitarian terms, no matter how others choose to judge you.

So I cannot accept a worldview that would reduce a person's value to "what they have to offer," regardless of whether it might help individual men and women to take responsibility and begin doing. If your choices are all made with an eye to an invisible scoreboard charting your utilitarian value, what aspect of your self are they an expression of? What kind of person are you?

No, there needs to be more. Not a separation of self and action, but a unity that strives for authentic growth in truth, not out of utility.

Until we act, we can be mysteries even to ourselves, the depths of subjectivity left unplumbed and unexplored.

I am more than my actions--but it is only expressed through action that the self can be known.

For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

As I try not to mention too often, I've been working out at a bootcamp called Fit for Christ* for almost a year now. I'm happy about my body going from enemy to ally--but that's what I was aiming at, so it wasn't a total surprise. But four ideas that have helped me go from couch potato to, well, much less of a couch potato, have also helped me in other areas of my life. The connection between body and soul is mysterious but real.

On the chance that these ideas might help you, too, here they are. I'm grouping them under The Four Sayings of Uncle Larry--that's Larry Lee, sometime circus clown, aerialist and stuntman, now coach to a bunch of well-intentioned neighborhood people in unexotic Hyattsville, Maryland.

1. "Fight for it."

Sometimes Uncle Larry will tell us to do something truly terrifying, like a set of 8-count burpees or a 2-minute high plank. In the beginning, I'd make a token attempt and fizzle out as soon as things got unpleasant, which was pretty much immediately.

And he'd say: "Fight for it!"

I finally did start fighting for it, and it turned out I could do a burpee. Eventually I could do a pushup. Later I could do twelve.

And it turns out, when I'm faced with the intellectual or spiritual equivalent of a set of military-style pushups with leg extensions, I can tell myself "Fight for it!"--and it helps. As C. S. Lewis says somewhere, we give up too easily. We imagine temptation is irresistible because we think there are only two choices: give in or suffer forever. We don't know if a temptation might fade away if we kept resisting--because we don't resist long enough to find out. We don't fight for it.

2. "Prove it."

When Uncle Larry's going over ground rules for newcomers, he'll give this speech: "'I can't do a pushup,' you say? OK, but don't just tell me you can't do a pushup. Prove it! Show me you can't do a pushup!" The idea is, instead of cementing yourself in your "limiting belief" that pushups are not a thing you do, you're attempting, maybe, a knees-down pushup, or a half-pushup crowned by a pathetic collapse on the pavement. Each time you do that, you get a little stronger. You might get strong enough to do a real pushup one day. But if you refuse to try, you just stagnate.

This works in the non-physical world, too. Don't just say you can't pray a novena, or write a book, or homeschool a kid--prove it! Try it (unless, of course, there's some genuine reason not to) and see what happens. Go ahead--prove what a loser you are.

3. "We start together; we finish together."

This one works as follows: There we are, running laps around the parking lot. Some of us are running an eight-minute mile, and some of us are mentally reviewing the symptoms of a heart attack, because we think we might be having one as we pant our way through our nineteen-minute mile. Some of us--this was me last year--are walking, not running, for the first month or so, because we haven't run in thirty years except that one time with our friend Joe, who would smoke AS HE RAN, so it was a little embarrassing to be outrun by Joe.

But when the boot campers who finish sooner are done, they go back to accompany the ones who are still lumbering along. They don't sneer, either: they're sympathetic and encouraging, because they remember how they used to be the ones lumbering along. The fast ones aren't slowed down, and the slow ones get faster (or at least don't feel abandoned).

This is also transferable to spiritual things. If we study together and worship together and lean on each other through family crises, nobody feels abandoned, and everybody gets a chance to be useful. "It is not good for man to be alone" is still true, even for introverts, even for stubborn people. When Moses lifted up his hands, the Israelites had the best of the battle. That was some dramatic, supernatural aid--but even so, his arms got tired, and his people would have been defeated despite the miracle if his friends hadn't been there holding up his arms.

Let your friends hold up your arms.

4. "I've got aworkaround for you."

I don't mean to imply that the power of positive thinking, or the support of fellow sufferers, is a guarantee of success in everything life might throw at you. Sometimes no amount of "fighting for it" or "proving it" or "accompaniment" will make you able to do a certain exercise. Do you get kicked out of the group? No, Uncle Larry devises a workaround. Maybe you do your pushups on your knees, or you sort of bounce your legs when other people are doing the pushup part of the burpee. You do what you can. You don't stop pushing yourself: you do something, but you don't despair, because, as another Saying of Uncle Larry has it, it's a work in progress.

And this, of course, is a helpful approach for the rest of life, too. You're not a perfectionist if you have high standards; you're a perfectionist if you refuse to do something at all unless you can do it just exactly right. But very few things in life absolutely have to be done one particular way. Resourcefulness, imagination, and a willingness to improvise can take you a lot farther than a purist mindset will. I'm not talking about going mushy on Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. I'm talking about making peace with "close enough" in everyday life while also trying to do better.

So wish me well on my one-year anniversary! And join me sometime in our parking lot.

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*Mens sana in corpore sano: ancient Roman saying meaning "healthy mind in a healthy body." Mens sana in corpore whatever: loosely translated--"The mind is what counts, so eat all the bagels you can."

**That's "fit" as in "physically fit," not "fit" as in "deserving of."

I said in an earlier post that John Paul II and Benedict XVI were, humanly speaking, two of the prime authors and protagonists of the new paradigm in the Church. I have in mind "the turn toward subjectivity" that has characterized modernity and the post-conciliar Church.

To get this, you have to understand that these two great thinkers, council fathers, and later popes, were not exclusively concerned with preserving doctrine against modernist threats. They were also concerned with and intent on grasping "whatever is true" in modern thought and experience, and incorporating that into the living Tradition of our faith.

I wish I could find the reference now where the Pope Emeritus tells an interviewer that when he looks back at human history what he sees a bright trail of the "magnalia dei"—the great acts of God. John Paul II said in Familiaris Consortio that “the call and demands of the Spirit resound in the very events of history.” That general sense suffuses all their writings.

Sound theology and a fortiori papal teaching is not about documents exclusively. It's even more primarily about experience. (Keep in mind that the fundamental doctrines of our Faith were not given through a text, but by way of concrete events and personal encounters.) It listens receptively and sympathetically to experience, “so the Church can also be guided to a more profound understanding of the inexhaustible myster[ies]" of our Faith. (FC)

This openness to experience is not novel in ecclesial history. How was Peter persuaded that gentiles don't need to be circumcised before they're baptized? By studying the law? No. Through experience.

While Peter was still speaking these things,the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peterwere astounded that the gift of the Holy Spiritshould have been poured out on the Gentiles also,for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God.Then Peter responded,"Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?"He ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.

Unless we understand this, we're missing the key. We can't hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church in our day. We won't properly understand Vatican II; we'll have at best a one-sided appreciation of John Paul II, and we will fail to perceive the luminous line of continuity between him and his successors, including especially Pope Francis.

We'll also be obtuse to the need for a new pastoral paradigm. And because of that, many of our efforts toward the new evangelization will backfire. We'll be coming across (despite our best intentions to the contrary) as self-righteous, rigid, and condemnatory, not as helpers and healers and bearer of good news.

I know this needs some explaining. Stick with me while I zoom way out, then back in.

Someone better versed in the history of culture and philosophy than I am might argue that it started with Palestrina and the introduction of counterpoint music. Or you could go farther back in time to the Magna Carta and the Barons of Runnymede with their insistence on the rights of individuals vis a vis the king. There was the invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy, allowing ordinary people to encounter texts, including the Bible, for themselves. The Protestant Reformation and subsequent religious wars were certainly major factors in the development of our understanding of conscience and religious liberty. There was the embarrassing Galileo affair and the Copernican Revolution in science. We had those great medieval saints and defiers-of-overreaching-authority: Joan of Arc and Thomas More.

The seventeenth century gave us Descartes and his effort to find grounds for rational certainty in the experience of knowing rather than in external authority, plus John Locke and the other thinkers of the Enlightenment. There was the Age of Exploration, the founding of the New World, the beginnings of global trade, the vicious exploitation of indigenous peoples, and slavery. In the 18th century came Kant with his definition of persons as "ends-in-themselves, never to be used as a mere means," which was later adopted and adapted by Wojtyla as "the personalistic norm" of ethics. There was the American Revolution and the practical establishment of the concept of "government of the people, by the people and for the people."

In the 19th century we had Newman with his elaboration of implicit reasoning and the illative sense, plus the abolitionist movement and the beginnings of feminism and evangelical Christianity with its emphasis on personal experience in religion. There was the rise of nationalism against Empire. The papacy was compelled to abandon its temporal power; its teaching authority was formally limited to the areas of faith and morals. We got the music and poetry of the romantics, and the art of the impressionists and expressionists. Suddenly, beside giants like Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, women were writing great literature. Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontes, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning...

New things were happening, both good and bad. New discoveries were being made, bringing new problems, new questions, new aspirations.

You had rationalism and idealism and empiricism and materialism, the industrial revolution and the end of the agriculture-based society. After the cataclysmic destruction of the old order of Christian empires in blood-soaked insanity of World War I, the 20th century gave us "the little way" of St. Therese of Lisieux (a quite radical development in Catholic spirituality), and women's suffrage. Social justice became a matter of concern in papal documents. Totalitarian ideologies made their appearance, and more horrible wars with their countless victims and martyrs. We saw the evil phenomenon of genocide, the collapse of colonialism, the rise of mass media, the "discovery" of the sub-conscious and the founding of psychology, the sexual revolution, the spread of secularism and moral relativism, and then, too—almost smack dab in the middle of the century—the Second Vatican Council, followed by the stupendous papacy of St. John Paul II the Great.

A proper account of it all is a million miles beyond my scope and competence. Here I only mean to indicate that the need for a new paradigm has been a long time coming. It's developed organically over centuries, in disparate places, and across various sectors of human life and culture.

One way to characterize the trajectory and achievement of modernity from a spiritual point of view—the way, I would argue, the Church characterizes it—is to say that we, the heirs and progenitors of Western Civilization, have been gradually waking up to subjectivity. And, as John Crosby puts it in the essay he wrote for our site, "This awakening of human beings to personal existence is an epochal event, a sea-change in the way we understand ourselves."

The basic story line is nicely captured and illustrated in the musical A Fiddler on the Roof. Pressures from within and without mean that a way of life previously governed by clearly defined social roles, rules and traditions is no longer sustainable. We have to let those go, and find a new way of living and dealing with one another—one that takes due account of the dignity of each person as a person, an absolutely unique and irrepeatable subject.

I warned you I might need the rest of my life to explain. I'll try not to be so slow with the next installment.

Amid all the ongoing disdain for the Pope in certain conservative circles, a March Gospel reading stood out to me. It's from John 7:40-53. In the preceding verses, controversy is brewing over Jesus' teaching and his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath. The religious leaders of the day resent him and begin plotting against him.

Jesus challenges them:

21 “I did one miracle, and you are all amazed.22 Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs),you circumcise a boy on the Sabbath.23 Now if a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing a man’s whole body on the Sabbath?24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”

Judging correctly evidently means not prioritizing the letter of the law over its spirit. It means grasping and the real thrust and meaning of the law as being for man. The Pharisees were instead using it as a means of controlling others and aggrandizing themselves.

Then Jesus promises that springs of living water will flow within anyone who believes in him.

40 On hearing his words, some of the people said, “Surely this man is the Prophet.”

41 Others said, “He is the Messiah.”

Still others asked, “How can the Messiah come from Galilee?42 Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?”43 Thus the people were divided because of Jesus.44 Some wanted to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him.

45 Finally the temple guards went back to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who asked them, “Why didn’t you bring him in?”

46 “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards replied.

47 “You mean he has deceived you also?” the Pharisees retorted.48 “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him?49 No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”

50 Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus earlier and who was one of their own number, asked,51 “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?”

52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.”

Notice that rather than being moved by the testimony of those who have personally experienced Jesus, they're only interested in the law. They show contempt for those who aren't as well-versed in it as they are. They are experts, and they know, as the ignorant crowd doesn't, that the Messiah will come from Bethlehem, not Galilee. The crowd, meanwhile, may not really know or care about all that, but they're open to experience, and they recognize that Jesus speaks and acts with divine authority.

The Pharisees were right that the Messiah was to come from Bethlehem, but they were wrong in a much deeper and more important sense. Their vaunted expertise backfired on them. Their inner attitude and their attachment to a too-narrow understanding of the law led them to reject Jesus. The unlettered crowd, whose hopes and expectations came from their experience of need and their hope of salvation were in a much better position, spiritually speaking, to recognize Him.

Notice too that this Gospel passage does nothing to suggest that the law isn't important and needn't be fulfilled. On the contrary. The reader relishes the irony of knowing what that Pharisees don't—that Jesus did come from Bethlehem. The law will be fulfilled, but in a way that takes experts in the law by surprise.

It's almost as if the whole thing were arranged by the Holy Spirit to foil the law-obsessed.

Mother's Day is coming up. As good a time as any to try to get inside the head of Mary, Mother of God.

In an episode that makes many scatterbrained mamas feel just a little better, Mary and Joseph once left the boy Jesus in Jerusalem and didn't notice it until they were well on their way home. As I was just telling my own children (several of whom have been left behind now and then), I'm sure it wasn't that Mary and Joseph forgot all about Him. It's just that some relatives thought he was with others, and those others thought he was with the OTHER others. They didn't forget about Him. They mistakenly assumed He was accounted for; that's all.

Something new struck me this time around, though. When they finally locate Him, and it turns out He's fine--no robbers, no kidnappings, no accidents--He pulls their rejoicing up short with the words, "Did you not know I must be about my Father's business?"

Now, Mary knew who His Father was. It might possibly have felt to Joseph as if He were throwing it up in his face that he wasn't Jesus' "real" father. I think we can safely assume that, even as an almost-teenager, Jesus would have said it kindly, not insultingly.

What I'm wondering is, did Mary, and maybe Joseph, ever sort of forget that Jesus wasn't Joseph's son? It doesn't seem likely, and I'm certainly not buying any claim that Mary didn't really how she'd gotten pregnant. But you know how sometimes you have an unmistakeable, earthshaking spiritual experience, one where God breaks through into your everyday life and gives you some crystal-clear message that you can't possibly doubt is from Him--and then time goes by, and you're changing diapers and filling out insurance paperwork and figuring out what's for supper, and everything's been so very ordinary for so very long--and you start asking yourself: "Did that really happen? Was that even real? I remember it, but it seems like a dream sometimes. I know I thought it was real while it was going on, but now…"

It may be theologically un-kosher to suggest that the Theotokos was subject to this kind of confusion. If you don't have original sin, your intellect isn't darkened. The problem with trying to put yourself in the frame of mind of the immaculately conceived Virgin Mary is that it can't be done. Still, it's so important to remember that she's a real person, not a statue, a silent image, a passive model who has nothing in common with us.

It's good, then, for us to keep on asking ourselves: What must it have been like? What would I have done? What must she have thought? Her words--"Son, why have you done so to us?"--suggest that maybe being immaculately conceived doesn't make you immune to the kind of worries and inner turmoil the rest of us mamas of 12-year-olds know so well. I don't think that when she says, "Your father and I have been searching for you," it really means that she forgot who Joseph was. He was His father legally, and I have no doubt that he was just as concerned, just as affectionate, as a biological father would have been.